Phantoms of Breslau

indirectly.” He ran his fingers over his eyelids and felt the sand that had built up through lack of sleep. “A woman I fell in love with … She was a prostitute and a dance-hostess … I’d spent three weeks with her in Rugenwaldermunde …”

“Is it that Kiesewalter?” Ruhtgard asked, reaching for the Breslauer Neueste Nachrichten. He looked very tense, his face like a petrified mask of pain. The doctor leaned towards Mock and grabbed him by the biceps. His fingers were as strong as they had been when he picked up his shattered friend in a Konigsberg street.

“What’s happened, Corni?” Mock said, putting down his full glass.

“Brother,” Ruhtgard stammered, “how sorry I feel for you … That girl” — he sprang out of his armchair and slammed his palm down on the photograph on the front page of the newspaper — “is your dream. It’s the girl of your dreams, your nurse from Konigsberg who doesn’t exist …”

Mock stood up and wiped his damp forehead with the back of his hand. Doctor Ruhtgard’s study grew longer and narrower. The window appeared to be a far off, bright point. The pictures on the walls distorted into rhomboids, Ruhtgard’s head sank into his shoulders. Mock stumbled into the bathroom adjacent to the study, tripped and fell to the floor, hitting his forehead against the edge of the porcelain toilet bowl. The blow was so hard that tears filled his eyes. He closed them and felt the warm bump on his forehead pulsate. He opened his eyes again and waited for the veil of tears to disperse. Objects returned to their rightful proportions. Ruhtgard was standing in the doorway, his head once again its rightful size. Mock pushed himself up on his knees and pulled his Mauser from his pocket. He checked that it was loaded and slurred:

“Either I kill myself, or I kill that son of a whore who was supposed to keep an eye on her …”

“Wait a moment,” Ruhtgard said, grasping Mock’s wrists in his iron grip. “Don’t kill anyone. Sit down on the sofa and tell me everything, calmly … We’ll find a solution, you’ll see … After all, that girl has only disappeared, she might still be alive …”

He pulled Mock forcibly to the study sofa. The velvet-upholstered piece was too short for Mock to lie on comfortably, so Ruhtgard laid his friend’s head on a large pillow and his feet on the armrest at the other end. He removed his shoes and applied a cold letter-knife to the bump.

“I’m not going to tell you anything.” Ruhtgard’s nursing clearly brought Mock relief. “I can’t talk about it, Corni … I just can’t …”

“You have no idea how much it can help to talk to someone who sympathizes with you …” The doctor was very serious. His grey, evenly trimmed beard bristled with kindness, and his pince-nez flashed wisely. “Listen to me, I know a form of therapy which can work extremely well when patients have a block, when they don’t want to or can’t fully trust their psychologist …”

“You’re not a psychologist, Ruhtgard.” Mock sensed drowsiness creep over him. “And I’m not your patient … I haven’t, as yet, caught syphilis …”

“But you are my friend.” Now it seemed that Ruhtgard was the one with the block; umpteen seconds passed before he blurted: “And the only one at that, the only one I’ve ever had, or have …”

“And what method is that?” Mock appeared not to have heard the confession.

“A method which allows one to get into your subconscious … which reveals what is unconscious and negated in an individual. What you may have experienced only once, what you may be ashamed of … This method might, for example, make you realize that it is your father you love most, and that the girl who has disappeared is no more than a passing infatuation … When you understand yourself, nothing will make you angry … You will live and act true to your innermost being. Gnothi seauton!^† This method is called hypnosis … Don’t worry, I’m an expert hypnotist. I’ve mastered the art. I won’t harm you, just as I didn’t harm my daughter when I put her into a trance. How could I ever harm the person dearest to me?”

Mock did not hear Ruhtgard’s last words. The autumn wind sending flurries of yellow leaves into flight in Breslau’s South Park became a sea wind, and the river whose dark and turbulent waters flowed not far from Ruhtgard’s house ceased to be the lazy Oder, and became the Pregel, stirred by the salty breeze.

Mock found himself in Konigsberg.

KONIGSBERG, SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 28TH, 1916

MIDNIGHT

Private Eberhard Mock could not climb the stairs in the tenement at Kniprodestrasse 8, but not because they were exceptionally steep or slippery. The reason was quite different: pumped up with six tall shots of Trishdivinis, a Lithuanian herbal schnapps, he was not in a state even to give the date of his birth. Slumped against the banister he tried to recite the first twenty lines of The Aeneid without making any mistakes, in order to convince himself that he was sober. But he could only get as far as the bit about Carthage before the epic’s first lines — “Arma virumque cano”^† — would come back at him like an echo. The regularity of the Latin hexameters introduced a certain order to his brain, which on that winter evening was swimming in schnapps as bitter as absinthe rather than in cerebrospinal fluid.

A signal from his brain reached his extremities and Mock finally made it to the first floor, his spurs ringing out proudly. Even though he had been demoted to private as a former soldier of a reconnoitring platoon, he retained the right to wear spurs. Outside his apartment he felt a huge wave of shame at not being able to get beyond the twelfth verse. He clicked his heels, making an ear-splitting racket with his spurs, and yelled:

“I’m extremely sorry, Professor Moravjetz! I’ve not learned it for today, but I’ll know it all by tomorrow! All fifty verses!”

His diaphragm surged and a mighty hiccough forced its way through Mock’s gullet. He pulled a key from his pocket and pushed it into the hole. There was a grating, and he felt the metal resist. Swaying, he produced a metal pipe-cleaning brush from his pocket and slipped that into the keyhole. He pressed his whole weight down on the primitive lever and heard a crack as the cleaning brush snapped. A Mauser 98 appeared in his hand. He aimed at the lock and pulled the trigger.

The noise shook the tenement. Doors to the other apartments opened. Someone shouted at Mock from above:

“What are you doing, you drunken pig? You live one floor up!”

Mock kicked the lock with his heel and forced his way into the hallway. “Did you hear that noise, like a gunshot?” somebody was shouting. “It’s him! He’s here already!” Mock stood unsteadily in the middle of the hallway before proceeding slowly, his spurs clanking. He came to a velvet curtain and drew it aside. He entered another hallway. It was a waiting room, with doors giving on to several rooms. One of them was ajar, but another heavy curtain hung from its lintel. One of the walls had no door but a window. It gave on to the ventilation pit. Outside on the window sill stood a paraffin lamp whose feeble glow barely penetrated the dusty pane. In the meagre twilight, Mock saw a number of people sitting in the waiting room. He did not manage to get a good look at them as his attention was drawn to the curtain hanging over the door. It moved suddenly. A cold draught and a sigh drifted from beyond it. Mock began to walk towards it, but a tall man in a top hat stood in his way. When Mock tried to move him aside the latter took off his headwear. In the pale semi-darkness he saw a knot of scar tissue as it refracted the dim light; the scars criss-crossed and interweaved in the man’s eye sockets. Instead of eyes he had a tangle of scars.

Mock stepped back but was not afraid. He shoved the blind man against the wall, laughed out loud and grabbed the edge of the curtain. From behind it two voices, those of a man and a woman, were uttering inarticulate sounds. Mock yanked at the fabric and caught his spur on an unevenness in the floor. He tumbled onto the sandstone flags and, with a rattle of fastening hooks, the thick green plush tore away and flowed down over him like a shroud. He pulled himself up and advanced on all fours towards an elderly woman who was sitting in the small room beyond the curtain, wheezing. She wore a trailing dark robe. The lamp on the windowsill illuminated her toothless mouth, and from it poured a white swathe which fell in tangles and folds at her feet.

“Ectoplasm!” shrieked a woman’s high-pitched voice. “She’s materialized it!”

Mock shook with a suppressed hiccough, which was all the stronger for being accompanied by drunken, uncontrollable laughter. The patter of the feet of curious neighbours resounded in the apartment.

“What ectoplasm!” Mock was in convulsions of laughter. He got up, tripped and made towards the medium, who was frozen in a trance. Without the slightest disgust he began to extract long white strips from the old woman’s mouth. “It’s an ordinary bandage!”